Castlerahan were supposed to have been one of the lucky ones.
The Cavan champions got the coveted two week break between their county final win, and their Ulster quarter-final. That’s a full fortnight, that’s plenty of time to celebrate, and it’s plenty of time to prepare for Eoghan Rua Coleraine. Right?
Not quite. They could have done with a bit more time.
Thing is, Caslterahan are a different type of county champion. Think of what you imagine a county final win feels like, and then imagine this one was sweetened by the fact that you’d lost the previous three of them before this one.
Imagine that with 20 minutes to go you were down by six points and looked dead and buried again, before you came back from the dead to win that county final by one single point, to win your club’s first ever county senior football final.
That’s exactly how Sunday 21 October went for Castlerahan GAA club. That’s exactly how they ended three years of hurt and it’s exactly how they ended a famine that ran forever before that.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BpRIrXglWH7/
Imagine what that did for the area and for the people of Ballyjamesduff, only a small area in county Cavan.
The boys of Castlerahan don’t have to imagine, but they can still be excused for feeling like they were living a dream for the next while.
It’s no surprise then that these lads did the dog on it for days after, basking in the glory of that beautiful October Sunday.
Congrats @Castlerahan_GAA @CavanCoBoardGaa senior champions 2018, cheers for dropping in Lads pic.twitter.com/qEOypU0wsr
— The BoarsHead Dublin (@boarsheaddublin) October 24, 2018
As it turned out, they stayed going strong, the whole way through the week and then into the Tuesday of the week after again. That’s a nine day bender with no surrender. That’s some going.
And that’s why their manager Donal Keoghan had some advice for his players after they were defeated by Eoghan Rua Coleraine in the Ulster quarter final on Sunday.
“The boys can get here again next year but, if they do, they needn’t party as hard, that’s the big thing,” he said to Andy Watters from the Irish News.
“They partied the whole week. I only got them back on Tuesday night.”
Two Sundays and plenty of beer on, they gave a fairly respectable account of themselves in Kingscourt. They got off to a slow start and were down by 2-6 to 0-6 at the break. But they called on the spirit that backboned their county win and they rallied to reduce the arrears to just one point with ten minutes to play.
In the end, the Derry men pulled away to win by six, but the boys of Castlerahan hadn’t gone down softly by any stretch of the imagination. Nobody knows if a bit less beer in the system would have changed the result of this game, but there’s no doubting that those lads celebrated a county final win like it has rarely been celebrated before.
